Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective, Part III (Gnosticism in Modern Scholarship)

This is the
third in a series of articles exploring the phenomenon of Gnosis or Gnosticism from a
“Non-Voegelinian Perspective.” Eric Voegelin (1901-1986) in The New Science
of Politics (1952),
Science Politics & Gnosticism
(1965), and elsewhere used the term “Gnosticism” to refer to the “closed” or
ideological-totalitarian systems that, for him, expressed the essence of
modernity. Voegelin was a critic of modernity, just as he was a critic of the
ideological-totalitarian systems, and in his usage the term Gnosticism (taking
it out of quotation-marks) always carried a strong pejorative connotation. In Voegelin’s
view, as expressed especially in the multi-volume study Order and
History
(1957-1965), Gnosticism sought to triumph but failed to do so in Antiquity, but
then emerged anew in the early modern period to become the dominant Weltanschauung of the Twentieth Century. Voegelin
did not mean – as some took him to mean – that specific Gnostic doctrines,
surviving in latency during the medieval period, then sprang back to life in
all their details; rather, Voegelin argued that the difficulty of coming to
terms with the “tension” (the perceived imperfection or even hostility) of
existence inclined some people to deny existence by constructing an elaborate
“second reality.”

The “second
reality” eliminates anything inimical to the maladjusted ego in the real world.
The real world persists, however, which means that the advocates of the “second
reality” find themselves in perpetual conflict with existence. Ideology, for
Voegelin, is a magical gesture aimed at altering the structure of reality
through unanimous declaration; the requirement for unanimity means that the
Gnostic polity must quash all dissenting voices.

Voegelin
did not evoke the topic of Gnosticism in a vacuum. The scholarship of Gnosis goes back to various students of
G.W.F. Hegel, particularly to Ferdinand
Christian Baur (1792-1860), whose pioneering study, Die Christliche Gnosis (Christian
Gnosis, 1835), remains a touchstone. Nevertheless,
the take-off of Gnostic scholarship happened in the Twentieth Century. A
pivotal work appeared in The Gnostic Religion (1958), by Hans Jonas (1903-1993), reissued and
revised in 1963, 1991, and 2001. With Kurt Rudolph (born 1929), whose Gnosis:
The Nature and History of Gnosticism
appeared in 1977, Jonas was a dominant presence in the field right up to his
death. More recently, the names of Giovanni Filoramo (born 1945) and Yuri
Stoyanov (born 1961) have become obligatory references. So has that of Michel
Tardieu (born 1938) for his succinct book, Manichaeism (1981; English version 2008). It should be
emphasized that Voegelin was never a primary scholar of Gnosticism. Jonas,
Rudolph, and Filoramo, with whom the present essay deals, were and are primary
scholars of Gnosticism. Their objectivity distinguishes them from well known
others (J. M. Robinson, for example, and Elaine Pagels) whose interest in
Gnosticism is rather more advocative than unprincipled.

I. Baur
was a student of Hegel. Hans Jonas studied philosophy under Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger,
and theology under Rudolf
Bultmann. Jonas was particularly associated with Heidegger until, in
1933, Heidegger’s suddenly candid Nazi sympathies and Jonas’ Jewishness not
only brutally alienated the student from the teacher but also sent the student
(doctorate incomplete) into exile to England and thence (1934) to what was
still called Palestine. He joined the British Army and returned to Germany in
1945 as a soldier on the victorious side. After the war, Jonas taught in
Canada. He joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research in New
York, in 1955. In later life, Jonas wrote two books – The Phenomenon of Life
(1966) and The Imperative of
Responsibility (1979) – that influenced the
direction of environmentalism and its offshoot in so-called “green politics.” Conservative
readers will feel a shudder of aversion, perhaps, in the divulgence of these
latter phases of the Jonas biography, but they should bracket the response. Jonas’
magnum opus remains his Gnostic
Religion, a book indispensable for an
understanding of Gnosis in its
Late Antique context and beyond. The book served that function for Voegelin,
who knew it and studied it and incorporated much of its thesis into the fourth
(and at the time seemingly the final) volume of Order and History,
The Ecumenic Age (1965).

Jonas
described himself as an Existentialist, a label that Heidegger always eschewed.
Jonas approached Gnosis,
through the phenomenological method, from a discernible Existential
perspective. [See Note 1]
Like Baur, approaching his topic with respect, Jonas took the Gnostic documents
seriously, seeing in the documents expressions of anguished consciousness
grappling with problems of a disintegrating civilization.

For Jonas
the context of Gnosticism is the late, markedly religious phase of Hellenism.
The first phase of Hellenism announced itself in Alexander of Macedon’s
prodigious conquests and the establishment, in their wake, of the Diadochic Kingdoms. Greek
language and Greek high culture became a universal medium of discourse in a
great swath of geography from Greece itself right through Persia to Central
Asia. Jonas tends to couch his understanding of this new Greek-speaking Orient
in dialectical terms: The lingua franca and its related thinking, imposed from above,
constituted the unity of a “cosmopolitan secular culture”; the submerged local
cultures constituted the multiplicity, in which, in order to articulate itself,
each peculiar worldview must employ the standard Hellenic parole of “man as such” and its
accompanying techniques of rhetoric and logic. But the pre-Greek societies were
not rational or secular societies; they were religious societies or temple
polities that articulated their local worldviews as myth. In the course of
three centuries, in Jonas’ summary, the varieties of local religiosity
gradually transformed the Greek-speaking Orient into “a pagan religious
culture” stemming from “profoundly un-Greek sources.”

Gnosticism,
like Judaism and Christianity, represents one element in this composite matrix
of eclectic notions from diverse ethnic sources, but there were many others:
Mithraism, the Astarte and Isis cults, Astrology, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism –
even Stoicism had eastern roots. [See Note 2]

By the
beginning of the Third Century, this dialectical transformation of secularity
into religiosity had reached its terminal form: “Traditional dualism,
traditional astrological fatalism, traditional monotheism were all drawn into
it, yet with such a peculiarly new twist to them that in the present setting
they subserved the presentation of a novel spiritual principle.” This new
soul-idea signifies a unity or homogeneity, in which the patchwork of peculiar
systems is overcome. The same dispensation finds its most radical, hence also
its most representative expression, in a “dualistic transcendent religion of
salvation” for
which the main label is Gnosis.
This Greek word, formerly central to philosophy, takes on a meaning absolutely
opposite to its normative, rational usage. [See Note 3]

Jonas
writes, “Gnosis
meant pre-eminently knowledge of God, and from what we have said about the radical
transcendence of the deity it follows that ‘knowledge of God’ is the knowledge
of something naturally unknowable and therefore itself not a natural
condition.” Gnosis
concerns “secrets of salvation,” reception of which “is itself… a modification
of the human condition,” an “event in the soul” that “transforms the knower
himself by making him a partaker in the divine existence.”

In Jonas’
formula, “the cardinal feature of gnostic thought is the radical dualism that
governs the relation of God and the world, and correspondingly that of man and
the world.” Jonas allows the consensus that such radical dualism has its source
in Iranian cosmology. That, however, is mere genealogy, which interests Jonas
much less than the ramping up of the ontological dichotomy in the Late Antique
doctrines. In Gnosticism, as Jonas describes it, “the deity is absolutely
transmundane,” and really not knowable in mundane terms – not an object of
Platonic or Aristotelian “theoria.”
By contrast, “the world is the work of lowly powers which though they may
mediately be descended from Him do not know the true God and obstruct the
knowledge of him in the cosmos over which they rule.” Jonas notes the
incorporation in Gnostic cosmology, always under its imperative of antithetical
revaluation, of elements from Iranian, Babylonian, Syrian, and Egyptian theology.
All gods below the transmundane God become demonic in the conception: “Their
tyrannical world-rule is called heimarmene, universal Fate, a concept taken
over from astrology but now tinged with the gnostic anti-cosmic spirit.”

The term
“anti-cosmic” plays a central role in Jonas’ analysis of the Gnostic worldview.
Jonas writes: “For the world as a whole, vast as it appears to its inhabitants,
we have thus the visual image of an enclosed cell – what Marcion contemptuously
called haec cellula creatoris
– into which or out of which life may move.” Governed by the Archons, or lower,
demonic gods, “the universe… is like a vast prison whose innermost dungeon is
the earth, the scene of man’s life.” Every aspect of existence becomes
demonized in the Gnostic re-conception of them. Thus all known extension,
whether geographical or celestial, becomes a labyrinth in which the souls of
the elect wander in a type of exiled; time, for the elect subject, becomes an
agony of postponement, an immensity of aeons (in the purely chronological
sense) that must play out before the transmundane deity abolishes the world. Again,
in Jonas’ resumption, “darkness has embodied its whole essence and power in
this world, which now therefore is the world of darkness.”

Opposite to
this world is
the “Pleroma,” the divine, immaterial realm existing transcendentally apart
from and beyond this world,
from which material existence descended or fell as
the result of a spiritual catastrophe. Drawing on the Valentinian Gospel of
Truth, Jonas tells
how: “In the invisible and nameless heights there was a perfect Aeon
pre-existent. His name is Fore-Beginning, Forefather, and Abyss… Through
immeasurable eternities he remained in profoundest repose.” The term Pleroma
(“Fullness”) refers to the total self-sufficiency of the “Forefather” in the
realm of light, which is (counter-intuitively and paradoxically) identical with
Him. The Forefather emanates other perfect beings to dwell with Him, to be in
Him, contemplate
Him, and glorify Him. One, Sophia, thinking to imitate the Forefather, attempts
emanations of her own.

Sophia’s superbia
resulted in what
the deluded think of as creation. Gnosis, however, reveals Sophia’s deed to be an aborted
mockery of the Pleroma. Sparks from the luminous realm, atoms of the Forefather
Himself, have become imprisoned in the abortion. Jonas writes, “This is one of
the fundamental symbols of Gnosticism: a pre-cosmic fall of part of the divine
principle underlies the genesis of the world and of human existence.”

II.
Jonas stresses that although Gnosticism appropriates the language of philosophy
and although the authors of the Gnostic tracts demonstrate a system-building
talent that results in something that often resembles philosophy, nevertheless
Gnosticism remains non- and more especially anti-philosophical. Jonas remarks
on the Gnostic use of the rhetorical-analytic device called allegoresis. One can follow the drawing of allegories between
rational discourse and mythic or symbolic discourse back to Plato. The
technique gained currency, however, not in the immediate post-Classical period
but in the last, transitional sub-phase of secular Hellenism. A key figure in
the validation of allegoresis is Philo Judaeus (20 BC – 50
AD), the Alexandrian rabbi and Platonic philosopher who sought to demonstrate
the compatibility of Mosaic revelation, as codified in the Old Testament, with
Platonic doctrine, as articulated in the dialogues. Philo interpreted symbols
in the Old Testament as metaphors of Plato’s rational theology. “In
consequence,” as Jonas writes, “the myth, however freely handled, was never
contradicted nor were its own values controverted.” Jonas adds that, “The
system of scriptural allegory evolved in [Philo’s] school was bequeathed as a
model to the early Fathers of the Church,” and “here again the purpose is that
of integration and synthesis.”

Gnostic allegoresis functions otherwise: “Instead of
taking over the value system of the traditional myth, it proves the deeper
‘knowledge’ by reversing the roles of good and evil, sublime and base, blessed
and accursed, to be found in the original.” [See Note 4] An entire Gnostic sect named
itself after the serpent in Genesis – in Greek, they were the Ophites and in
Aramaic the Naassenes. Since it is the serpent,” Jonas writes, “that persuades
Adam and Eve to taste of the fruit of knowledge and thereby to disobey their
Creator, [the serpent] came in a whole group of systems to represent the
‘pneumatic’ principle from beyond counteracting the designs of the Demiurge,
and thus could become as much a symbol of the powers of redemption as the
biblical God had been degraded to a symbol of cosmic oppression.” A Gnostic
sect, the Peratae, “did not even shrink from regarding the historical Jesus as a particular incarnation of ‘the
general serpent,’ i.e., the serpent from Paradise understood as a principle.” The
Peratae reinterpreted Cain antithetically. Abel, being favored by God, and God
being for the Gnostics a false and wicked God, Cain is obviously a heroic
opponent of wickedness. “Perhaps we should speak in such cases,” writes Jonas,
“not of allegory at all, but of a form of polemics, that is, not of an exegesis
of an original text, but of its tendentious rewriting.” [See Note 5]

Jonas
judges that, for Gnosticism, “the negative evaluation of the cosmos is
fundamental.” One of the most valuable and daring parts of The Gnostic
Religion is the
suite of chapters devoted to the contrasting images of the cosmos in Greek and
Gnostic thinking, culminating in an Epilogue, written for the book’s
republication in the mid-1960s, on “Gnosticism, Existentialism, and Nihilism.” The
Greek and Gnostic images of the cosmos are ideas that imply specific
consequences in human behavior and in the structure of society that differ as
much as the images, or ideas, themselves. As Jonas reminds his readers, the
word cosmos, in
its normative usage, carries a wide range of positive connotations, which
together sum up a relation of the subject to its existence against the
universal backdrop. Jonas writes, “Cosmos means ‘order’ in general, whether of the world or
household, of a commonwealth or a life.” A bit later in the discussion: “The
universe was considered to be the perfect exemplar of order, and at the same
time the cause of all order in particulars,” as for example in the independent polis, or city-state. Jonas quotes Cicero
to the effect that, “man was born to contemplate the cosmos and to imitate it,” a precept that “establishes the
connection between cosmology and ethics.”

Jonas
points out, however, that Alexander’s conquests and the establishment of the
Diadochic Kingdoms altered the existential situation of the enlightened
individual, who was no longer unambiguously the citizen of an independent
city-state, but rather the subject, in the disestablished sense, of a kingdom
or empire. In Stoicism,
which responds to the new situation, the phrase “to play one’s part” becomes
prominent. As Jonas remarks, “a role played is substituted for a real function
performed.” The older precept of the Anthropos-cosmos integration became
afflicted by a “fictitious element in the construction.” As the suspicion grew
that “the part was insignificant to the whole,” the belief in the cosmos as
something meaningful entered a phase of “strained fervor.”

The
Gnostics, Jonas writes, seized on this rift in the old world-picture in an
ingenious – and prototypically antithetic and invidious – way: “In retaining
this name [cosmos]
for the world, the Gnostics retained the idea of order as the main
characteristic of what they were intent on deprecating. Indeed, instead of
denying to the world the attribute of order… they turned this very attribute
from one of praise into one of opprobrium, and in the process if anything
increased the emphasis on it.” The positive elements of hierarchy and
regularity in the old idea become “rigid and inimical order, tyrannical and
evil law” in the new idea. For the Platonic, Neoplatonic, and Stoic schools the
cosmos was itself, if not quite a god, then divine. But for Gnosticism the
cosmos becomes “devoid of meaning and goodness, alien to the purposes of man…
an order empty of divinity.”

In his
Epilogue, Jonas, having completed his “Existential reading of Gnosticism,”
undertakes what he calls his “Gnostic reading of Existentialism.” I construe
this Epilogue as a response to Voegelin, given its date and supplementary
character. Much of modern thinking, Jonas argues, especially the strain of
so-called Existentialism exemplified in the work of writers like Heidegger and
Sartre, expresses a type of revulsion against existence – tending to nihilism –
that strikingly resembles ancient Gnosticism. One difference is that Gnosticism
in its ancient context “was never admitted to the respectable company of…
philosophic tradition,” whereas modern nihilism might be said to dominate
discourse in every chapter of society. As in antiquity, “the disruption between
man and total reality is at the bottom of nihilism,” which constitutes a
“dualism without metaphysics.”

III.
If anyone were Jonas’ successor it would be Kurt Rudolph although Rudolph is
not so lively a writer as Jonas. Like Jonas, Rudolph emphasizes the radical
dualism of the general Gnostic worldview, including its vision of an absolutely
transmundane deity: “The gnostic idea of God is… not only the product of a
dualism hostile to the world, but it is at the same also a consequence of the
esoteric conception of knowledge”; and “dualism dominates the whole of gnostic
cosmology.” In Gnosticism, according to Rudolph, “the world of the creator is
subordinated to a world which lies before it in space and time, and at the same
time is thereby devaluated; its origin is to be explained from a disharmony
which somehow enters in at the margin of the upper world.” Rudolph, like Jonas,
remarks the eclecticism of the Gnostic system-builders. The systems “are built
together out of older mythological material,” giving “an impression of
artificiality.” Gnostic discourse “attaches itself in the main to older
religious imagery,” writes Rudolph, and it “prospers on the soil of ‘host
religions.’” Thus Gnosticism “can… be described as parasitic.” It is the case
that “Gnosticism strictly speaking has no tradition of its own but only a
borrowed one.” The borrowing, however, always conforms to radical reversal of
the original evaluation.

On Gnostic
anthropology, Rudolph observes the division of humanity into three “races” or genera – the “pneumatics,” who possess a
“Soul” or “Self” and hence are saved; the “psychics,” who possess a “Spirit” on the
animal-level, with whom the “pneumatics” may collaborate; and the “hylics,” who
are entirely of matter
and are doomed to perish with the material realm when the pervasion of knowledge abolishes that offense to the
Pleroma. Rudolph writes: “All three have originated in succession, but they are
united in the one first man; they form the three constituents of every man
[and] the one which in each case predominates determines the type of man to
which one belongs… Only pneumatics are gnostics and capable of redemption.” According
to Rudolph, the intermediate status of the psychics “does not signify any
weakening of the dualistic principle, but its consistent application in changed
situation,” in which missionary appeals to orthodox communities had come to
seem either desirable or necessary to the Gnostic communities in their struggle
for public sympathy.

In
addressing Jonas on Gnosticism, I made reference to the centrality of allegoresis in Gnostic discourse. Rudolph
identifies an example of allegoresis in the Gnostic “Anthropos-Myth.” Gnostic
system-builders reinterpreted the story of Adam this way: “The Body of Adam is
moulded by the creator and his angels… from the elements… Since, however, he
has no real life in him, he is equipped by the highest being in a secret or
mediated fashion with the divine spirit, i.e., the pneuma substance, which
exalts him above the creator God and bestows on him the capacity for
redemption.” Adam stands as the prototype of the pneumatics. Rudolph remarks
that, “redemption consists in the awakening of Adam to the knowledge of his true
origin and the worthlessness of the Demiurge.” This “Anthropos-Myth” replicates
the duality of the two worlds in microcosm in the constitution of the Primal
Man.

In its
survey of the chief Gnostic documents, drawing heavily on the Nag Hammadi cache,
Rudolph’s Gnosis
tends to duplicate Jonas. Writing at a later date than Jonas, however, Rudolph
had access to additional material either undiscovered or unpublished until the
1970s. Of particular interest are Rudolph’s treatments of Uighur and Tocharian
Gnosticism, more specifically, Manichaeism, and Mandaean Gnosticism, the only
certifiably Gnostic cult to survive from Late Antiquity continuously into the
present day. Whereas in the West Gnosticism had died out by the time of the
Gothic kingdoms, in the East, in Byzantium and farther afield in the
territories of the Persian Empire, Gnosticism enjoyed a long denouement. Especially
in Central Asia, Gnosticism took the particular form of the doctrine
originating in the perfervid religious imagination of a single figure. This was
Mani (216-276), who, in the Gnostic pattern established by Simon Magus,
presented himself as prophet and savior.

Manichaeism
enjoyed toleration in Persia under Shapur I and his successor Hormizd I; but
Hormizd’s successor Bahram I (reigned 273-276) sided with the Zoroastrian
clergy, jailed Mani, and proscribed the religion. Mani’s talent for missionary
organization insured that his movement would survive these setbacks. It did so
in North Africa, Italy, and Gaul for two centuries, and in areas east of Persia
for much longer. The Uighur Khanate, which dominated Central Asia in the Eighth
and Ninth Centuries, made Manichaeism the state religion, while supporting
missionaries as far away as China. The successor-states were also pronouncedly
Manichaean. Writes Rudolph: “Mani… did not regard himself as a philosopher but
[as] a gnostic theosophist and prophet [who] saw his task as fusing the
religious tradition of the Orient of his time into a universal religion of the
salvation of man.” Mani’s “dualism of spirit and body, light and darkness,”
resonated with Zoroastrianism and with many of the ethnic religions of the
steppes. Mani’s strict social division of an elite and a laity appealed to the
warrior societies of the Turks and Mongols.

Rudolph’s
book reproduces graphic material from the illuminated manuscripts of the
Central Asian Manichaeans. We see the white-robed elect instructing the laity
and copying the scriptures. The books specify the commandments of the faith,
including the enjoinment of “any doubt of [the] religion,” and, for the laity,
the requirement of “the indefatigable care of the elect.” This Turkic and
Tocharian literature from as late as the Thirteenth Century confirms in detail
Saint Augustine’s depiction of the Manichaean illuminati in his Confessions. Augustine explains the dietary
requirements of the elect, that they consumed vegetarian food supposed to
contain a high proportion of the particles of light from the Pleroma that were
trapped in matter. So too among the Uighur elect, the preferred table consisted
of “plants with a high content of light, such as cucumbers and melons, wheat
bread and… water or fruit juice.”

Rudolph’s
section on the Mandaeans, lately of southern Iraq but largely driven into exile
since Gulf War II (many Mandaeans now live in the USA), bears the title, “A
Relic.” Given their geographical situation, a Manichaean origin of the Mandaean
religion seems likely although the Mandaeans do not identify themselves as
Manichaeans. The word manda
means “knowledge.” The Mandaeans are by self-designation “knowers,” whose rich
literature reproduces the full range of eschatological motifs articulated in
the Nag Hammadi cache as well as in the Manichaean scriptures. Like the
Elchasaites, in whose religious dispensation Mani began life, the Mandaeans are
Baptists who, rejecting Christ, yet revere John the Baptist. The Mandaean
religion, like Manichaeism, is dualistic in the sense of depicting existence as
the battleground between a good deity of the light and an evil deity of the
darkness, with the latter temporarily holding the world in his grasp.

IV.
Before switching to Giovanni Filoramo it is worth quoting one of Rudolph’s
concluding statements, from the section of Gnosis devoted to “Consequences of Gnosis.” Rudolph refers to “the more or
less conscious, sometimes even amateurish, reception of gnostic ideas and
fragments of systems in modern syncretistic-theosophic sects.” Assessing the
ambiguities, Rudolph writes: “It is difficult to prove continuity in any
detail, as the connecting links are often ‘subterranean’ channels, or else the
relationships are based on reconstructions of the history of ideas which have
been undertaken especially in the history of philosophy.” Rudolph then mentions
– and the reader will detect some sympathy in the remark – Baur’s Christliche Gnosis (1835),
which “treats, in accordance with its theme, not only of the anti-gnostic
representatives of the early Christian ‘philosophy of religion,’ but also
exhaustively of the ‘ancient Gnosis and later philosophy of religion,’ dealing
with Jakob Böhme, Schelling, Schleiermacher, and especially Hegel, as its
heirs.” As in the case of certain remarks by Jonas, one has the strong
suspicion, concerning these words, that they address obliquely Voegelin’s
thesis, which is, in part, based on Baur’s study.

Rudolph
tends to withhold evaluation, taking a purely descriptive or scientific
approach to his topic. Filoramo, like Jonas, is more apt to make an evaluation
and to guess at motives, but this is not to assess A History of Gnosticism as anything but objective. In a
chapter called “The Gnostic Imagination,” Filoramo explores the meaning of Gnosis and sketches in the psychology that
the term implies. “Gnosis,” Filoramo writes, “is the ‘redemption of the
interior man,’ that is, the purification of the spiritual being and at the same
time knowledge of the Whole.” Referring to The Gospel of Truth, with its explanation of “the call
from above,” Filoramo remarks that in the Gnostic texts, the term Gnosis “has become synonymous with epignosis, recognition of one’s own true
reality,” which he glosses as “the ontological self that constitutes and is the
basis of reality” of “the interior man.”

In
responding to the call – in recognizing himself – the Gnostic affirms that his
subjective sense of belonging to a minority of the elect is actually the same
as objective reality. The Gnostic accesses the secret knowledge by divine revelation. But, as
Filoramo notes, “from the Gnostic point of view, revelation is possible only
because within the Gnostic there somehow pre-exists a disposition, a capacity,
a potential fitted for testing and getting to know that particular reality.” Filoramo
hesitates to go so far, but the thesis that Gnostic election is no more than an
auto-probative claim of moral superiority belongs to his definition of Gnosis. The opportunity for mischief
obviously conditions the Gnostic claim. Filoramo does link Gnosticism with the
increasing prominence in Late Antiquity of the hyperanthropos or superman. The pattern goes back
to Alexander, whose developing egomania included the idea of his godhead,
possibly as an incarnation of Dionysus. It continued in the charisma of magus-types like Simon and Apollonius and
in the delusions of one or two emperors; but it was a larger phenomenon.

The basic
Gnostic myth implies that the elect person is a god: When the catastrophe
occurred in the Pleroma, sparks of godhead became imprisoned in the world of
matter. The elect enjoy their ontological difference from others by possessing
such a spark as their soul. Posing the question, “Isn’t the Gnostic saved by
nature,” Filoramo answers with another question – “Isn’t it precisely the
awareness of this eternally preordained salvation that makes possible
[Gnosticism’s] ambivalent ethics [of] an ascetism that seeks to cancel out the
very root of our desires and a depraved antinomianism that mocks the laws of
this world and its rulers?”

“Perhaps
Jonas was right,” Filoramo opines, “to emphasize the anarchic and nihilistic
character of a naturally rebellious ethic in search of a metaphysical liberty,
which exists absolutely, in itself.” Yet, as Filoramo reminds readers in his
closing remarks, the personal side
of Gnosticism – in distinction to its doctrinal side – remains something of a
cipher. “If modern enquiry were possible, it would be… interesting to know how
self-aware the average Gnostic was.” Filoramo guesses generously that his
“average Gnostic” was simply someone in quest of the divine, a not ignoble
disposition. The objection arises automatically, once given the doctrine. The
whole of Late Antiquity was in quest of the divine and the Gnostics, even at
their zenith, were a minority. It is not simply that the Gnostic goes in search
of divinity that differentiates him from everyone else; it is that he already
knows where to find divinity – within himself. Indeed, the Gnostic himself is divine.

Gnosticism
remains radically different from both the emerging Christianity of Late
Antiquity and the lingering paganism in respect to its adjustment to existence.
For Gnostics, the material world is toxic and God is radically alien to it. For
pagans, nature is interpenetrated everywhere by God and by gods while for
Christians, God, despite being transmundane, contrives to descend into the
material world through incarnation to communicate in the flesh with those who seek him. For
Christians, inheriting the Jewish view, God is also the benevolent Creator of a
world that is good, over which he places humanity in stewardship. Christian
heresiologists and pagan critics of Gnosticism converged in condemning the
Gnostics for their world-revilement.

Gnosticism was rediscovered by scholarship early in the
Nineteenth Century. They heyday of that scholarship was the mid-Twentieth
Century. Curiosity about Gnosticism persists and grows. Novelist Dan Brown’s Da
Vinci Code (2003) is not scholarship, but
the success, including screen adaptation, of the book witnesses the popular
interest in Gnosticism of recent years. It is precisely as an antinomian symbol
that Gnosticism makes its appeal in the context of liberal mass entertainment. In
the previous essay to this one, I argued that the Gnostic myth is a variety of
scapegoat-myth. The Da Vinci Code
is also a scapegoat-myth, making use of the latent anti-Christian sentiment in
liberalism to focus reader-resentment on figures that represent normative
religion (the Catholic Church and some of its lay orders), and in raising as
its heroes the ancient Gnostics and their medieval Paulician and Cathar
descendants.

A proliferating modern literature concerns the fictitious
bloodline of Christ, who, according to the story, escaped crucifixion, espoused
Mary Magdalene, and found asylum from his persecutors in Southern Gaul. The
offspring of Jesus became the Merovingian royals. As in the case of the Gnostic
texts themselves, the very arbitrariness of the confabulations makes them
alluring. Their currency suggests that the impulses generative of the Gnostic
view, especially the requirement of many people for a second reality, remain in
place.

[1] Jonas’ Husserlian
background expresses itself in The Gnostic Religion in the sense that Jonas interprets
his primary documents as articulating a lived and felt reaction to the world; the
“Lifeworld” of the Gnostic must, on this analysis, contain elements that really
do “alienate” the subject and cause him to react against the structure of
reality. One should not forget, however, that there were other contemporaneous
responses to “alienation” that did not take the extreme – or, as I would say,
pathological – form that we see in the Gnostic doctrines. Among these were the
philosophical schools, especially the Neoplatonic School, but also Stoicism and
even Epicureanism, and finally Christianity.

[2] Zeno (334 BC -
262 BC), the founder of Stoicism, was a Cypriote and by ethnicity a Phoenician
of Tyrian extraction.

[3] Greek has a
number of terms ambiguously translatable by the English word, knowledge: Thus episteme means knowledge – of existing
things, or what we might call empirical knowledge; whereas sophrosyne is wisdom, as distinct from
empirical knowledge; and phronesis is a kind of prudential knowledge related
to wisdom. Gnosis,
on the other hand, refers to something like intuition although it can also
denote immediate understanding or a swift cognitive penetration to essence of
the matter. Gnosis is
also related to gnomon,
a puzzle or riddle. The English verb to know shows obviously morphological kinship
with the Greek verb, gnosein, as with the French connaitre, and the German kennen.

[4] I cannot help but
be put in mind of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (1980), or of most of the
work of Gore Vidal, or of ninety-nine out of a hundred written-for-college
humanities textbooks.

[5] The Romantics
knew of these heretical antitheses and they often followed suit, as in the case
of Percy Shelley, whose Prometheus Unbound (1820) is an antinomian fantasy. It is
noteworthy that, in Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville likens Captain Ahab, in his
nihilism, to “the ancient Ophites of the east.”

My favorite is this gem: 'Odysseus, the main character, though having the hand of Venus (Venus-Isis) right on his side, is faced with much despair when he has to leave his wife and son’s behind before he goes on many ‘adventures’ and encounters things. He defeats the Cycalopse after barely being eaten and meets Nausicaa while naked then stumbling over Calypso who holds him prisoner and gives him all of the winds'.

I accept the ideas of geological (and cosmological) time and of the development of complex from simple life forms. Descriptively, Darwin is right. Explanatorily he elides a profound and humbling mystery. There is a cultural “takeoff” around 10,000 BC and another after the invention of writing somewhere between 4,000 and 3,000 BC. Writing is, in Walter Ong’s definition, a technology that acts recursively on the mind that invents and uses it, transforming consciousness. The longstanding connection between writing and magic reflects, I believe, this “feedback” between the technique and the technician. Writing expands the capacity for symbolization. Alphabetic writing expands that capacity by many magnitudes. The Western tradition is coincident with the alphabetic tradition.

Mpresley writes: “I want to mention the idea that Christianity may be, perhaps inadvertently, bringing about its own demise due to what is, in my opinion, wrongheaded thinking among many of its adherents, possibly due to something intrinsic in its doctrine.”

Voegelin stresses the radical minimalism of Christian belief and he argues – as does also René Girard – that Christianity, like Mosaic Judaism, is a “de-divinizing” creed. (So, in all likelihood, is philosophical monotheism, as in Plato or in Stoicism.) Setting aside Revelation, which is anomalous in the New Testament, Christian eschatology is particularly minimal: And in Christianity (this is something that Søren Kierkegaard understood) faith and doubt become difficult to distinguish. It seems to Voegelin and Girard then that contrary to the smarmy standing opinion of militant atheism Christian faith was never a “crutch” to “make life easier” for “simple people.” Rather, Christianity made life more difficult because it demanded from its adherent greater degrees of patience, forbearance, and self-reliance than any previous (and the one subsequent) creed. In the framework of Voegelin’s analysis, the “wrongheaded thinking among many adherents [of Christianity]” to which Mpresley points would stem from the inability of many, many people to take up the paradoxical burden of Christian minimalism, with its emphasis on free will and ethical responsibility.

Mpresley wrote: “With Christianity came the idea of a universal salvation… Some argue that this universalism engendered the idea of a general equality of peoples, or at least an equality of souls… And because of this intrinsic equality, the Christian could and should abandon notions of ‘the other’ in favor of universal acceptance regardless of difference, and regardless of whether the others were hostile or otherwise incommensurate.”

Not only Voegelin, but also many other thinkers have derived the egalitarian idea from the universal anthropology of the Gospels. The notion of a universal humanity (everyone is potentially the conscious subject of the one redeeming deity) of the Gospels is conditioned, however, by the insistence that, at least in principle, all of humanity in monolithic unanimity participated in the Crucifixion. There is a universal opportunity for redemption because there is universal guilt and a universal need for atonement. Morally then in a Christian framework individuals will be measured by their progress in atonement. Once again, Christianity makes life more, not less, difficult than before. It is much easier to forget that one element of universal humanity is original sin and to recast human nature as natural innocence everywhere (the “Noble Savage”) betrayed rather than redeemed by the verbal tricks of priests. Notice that by expelling original sin and by representing the promulgators of the Gospel as the confounders of the people, the Rousseauvian scheme (that seems a good way to refer to it) lapses back into the sacrificial gesture that the Gospel denounces.

Mpresley wrote: “With abstract universalism comes concrete alienation, since what we are is most uniquely defined within a group containing unique features. This usually entails ethnicity, perhaps a more closed-ended religiosity, racial solidarity, and the clan or nationhood (using nation in its traditional meaning).”

Voegelin uses the term “compactness” – the homogeneity of tribal existence with its totems and myths and its view of the in-group as the only real humanity. Compactness is (I am coining a phrase) statically advantageous. Physiologically modern humans might have appeared as long ago as two hundred thousand years and for all but two thousand of those years all human beings lived in pockets of compactness. Life in 10, 000 BC was presumably very little different from life in 200, 000 BC. All of which suggests that people are “hard wired” to like compactness – which Mosaic Revelation and Philosophy and the Gospel all radically disrupt. The disruption engenders endless reactions (“wrongheaded thinking”) including the Gnostic reactions. I’m not quite sure that I have made my point coherently. I mentioned “de-divinization” but then dropped it. Is any of this helpful?

"Life in 10.000 BC was not much different from life in 200.000 BC."
This gives me an opportunity of coming back to my biggest question:"what happened around 10.000/15.000 years ago".
The earliest developed human beings with reading, writing and calculating skills were probably the Sumerians who, all of a sudden explosed on the scene with not only those skills, but also a Creation story.
Then human mental development goes faster and faster and again a Sumerian tribe, the Jews, refines the story from a pantheon of Gods to a One God religion with very high quality ground rules.
From story to story, told by many people in many similar forms, it becomes a religious philosophy.
What happened to those sleepy "apes" to have all of a sudden such mental explosive development and knowledge?

KO makes a valid point, which I would like to try to reconcile with my remarks in response to Mpresley. KO writes of contemporary mainstream Christian denominations that “rather than decrying Creation as evil, [they] celebrate the goodness of everyone and everything except those horrible white fundamentalists and conservatives.” The description is accurate. One should add the distinction, however, that the people displaying this mentality (simultaneously Gnostic and “PC”) decry as evil cultural creation rather than natural creation because the former is the work of the toxic “White Male” whose “Patriarchy” excludes and oppresses the non-Western “Other.” The “White Male” is numerically a minority, but (according to the second reality) in the extent of his Imperium over the “Other” he wields virtual majoritarian power. In this way of dealing the cards, those who are numerically in the majority continue to enjoy the moral “just desert” of minority status. In this way the Gnostic notion of the elect is preserved.

Voegelin makes an important point about the distinction between the ancient Gnostics and the modern ones. The ancient ones wanted to work their own redemption by abolishing natural creation; the modern ones want to do the same by “immanentizing the eschaton,” a somewhat ungainly coinage that means, bringing the City of God down to earth or restoring Eden. Like all magical acts, this one requires religious-magical gestures, invariably of a sacrificial character. The late and as far as I am concerned unlamented Susan Sontag expressed the sentiment candidly: “The white race is the cancer of the earth.” The therapy is to cut out the cancer. Thus the fanatics of the Twelfth Imam and their allies in Gaza and Lebanon are currently preparing, with the increasingly voluble support of the European and North American Left, to cut out the cancer of the “Zionist Occupation.”

At that climax, presumably, the oceans will turn to lemonade, just as in Fourier’s socialist prophecy. In one of his early manuscripts Marx wrote that the “Blutrausch,” the “Blood Rush” of revolution, would all by itself bring about the Communist utopia. The sentiments of Marx and Sontag (who was, of course, a Marxist) resonate with those expressed in the “Horst Wessel Lied,” which also lauds the redemptive power of the “Blutrausch.”

Part IV of “Gnosticism from a Non-Voegelinian Perspective,” which will revisit Voegelin’s text, will deal with these issues in greater detail. Meanwhile I agree entirely with KO’s identification of Rationalism with Gnosticism. The “experts” everywhere are our contemporary illuminated elect.

We've covered a lot of ground in this third series. I'm a little surprised, since the third seemed more esoteric and abstract. But it has engendered worthwhile comments, I believe. It is a pleasure to be a part of the group, and I thank all for comments.

This may be moving too far off topic, however I want to mention the idea that Christianity may be, perhaps inadvertently, bringing about its own demise due to what is, in my opinion, wrongheaded thinking among many of its adherents, possibly due to something intrinsic in its doctrine.

With Christianity came the idea of a universal salvation. That is, one did not have to be part of any special group in order to warrant salvation, but only accept Christ. Thus, one could be Jew, Greek, pagan or whatever else in one's past life, but once one became a Christian all ties to the past (whether religious, national, or ethnic) could be forgotten--at least from a religious standpoint. Some argue that this universalism engendered the idea of a general equality of peoples, or at least an equality of souls (and what is a soul if not the essence of a bodily form?), and because of this intrinsic equality, the Christian could and should abandon notions of "the other" in favor of universal acceptance regardless of difference, and regardless of whether the others were hostile or otherwise incommensurate.

However, with abstract universalism comes concrete alienation, since what we are is most uniquely defined within a group containing unique features. This usually entails ethnicity, perhaps a more closed-ended religiosity, racial solidarity, and the clan or nationhood (using nation in its traditional meaning). Because of this, it may be that the Jew is, despite the diaspora, perhaps more psychologically equipped to deal with their lot. No matter what their troubles, no matter what they are blamed for, and no matter what they are indeed guilty of, they remain Jews--a closed and self supporting network that does not admit "the other" in spite of their own assimilation (or not) into various nations. The Muslim, too, may have a psychological advantage over the universalist Christian.

But our Western universalism cannot be wholly blamed on Christianity (if indeed it is to be blamed at all). Universalism has been implied in modern political philosophy at least since Hobbes. For Hobbes needed equality to maintain the fiction of his original social contract. That is, unequals, and those of differing abilities and backgrounds cannot be rightly expected to enter into a binding contract on equal terms, at least morally. But maybe all this is for another Bertonneau essay (hint hint).

These words represent several “leaps” of purely associative thinking. Mpresley remarks the sanity of Augustine’s discovery that evil is not a substance and therefore also not an agent that can compel. A good part of whatever freedom modern Western people enjoy comes, I would argue, from the integration of this insight into a civic ethos. Hence in a lawful society we “hold people responsible” for their actions. (At least we used to do so.) Mpresley also accurately notes that many contemporary people who call themselves Christians nevertheless express the opposite view. With regard to any intentional or physical act that can possibly be categorized as a species of “lust” such people believe, based on what they say, that those acts are other voluntary and occur under compulsion from an external agent dedicated to corrupting the world.

Now this attitude – the antithesis of Augustine’s – is quite close to the Gnostic attitudes with which Augustine grappled and which he courageously repudiated. In fact there were Gnostics who held that a redeemed individual could not sin even though his body committed sinful acts and enjoyed the illicit pleasure of them; this was because the Gnostics regarded substance as sinful in toto and apriori and posited an absolute discontinuity between material body and immaterial spirit. (“My body fornicates, it is true, but that’s not me – it’s the wicked influence of Yaldabaoth.”) The soul being trapped in the body, it cannot be charged with what the body does.

Both of these “Gnosticizing” moral assertions have counterparts in existing Left-liberal social theory. The claim of “oppression,” for example, resembles the claim of “compulsion.” Thus embarrassing facts such as the disproportionate rates of crime and family dysfunction associated with certain social groups, which common sense would address by urging a new imposition of moral responsibility, may be morally defused by the position that those who act pathologically are not themselves guilty but are patsies animated in wickedness by external forces, against their will. (“It’s society’s fault.” “Fine, we’ll be charging Society, too,” as the constable says in the Monty Python sketch.)

Similarly, the license granted by the modern tolerance mandate to libidinous, gross, and uncivil comportment, which in an older moral environment would have been severely enjoined, resembles the “dispensation” theory of the Gnostic orgiasts. Thus hard-core San Francisco gays – because society “oppresses” gays – are apriori “good people” (“just like you and me – how could you think otherwise?”) and therefore no one may interfere with the obnoxious bathhouse culture or say that what goes on behind all that steam makes the perpetrators of it opprobrious.

What is my point? First: The primitive taboo-regime promulgated by many so-called Christian congregations suggests that these congregations are rather more Gnostic in their basic attitude toward existence than genuinely Christian. Second: The same primitive taboo-regime is structurally and morally indistinguishable from the Left-liberal theories of “compulsion” and “dispensation.” Third: The whole ensemble is Gnostic. Fourth: Insofar as these are, in aggregate, a dominant attitude reaching across the Left-Right divide then Voegelin was right – modernity is essentially Gnostic.

@mpresley and Dr. Bertonneau: Thanks for your careful and illuminating comments. Isn't the problem with today's churches a little different from what you are describing? Not that they are not Gnostic, but the mainstream denominations, rather than decrying Creation as evil, celebrate the goodness of everyone and everything except those horrible white fundamentalists and conservatives. In their Gnostic world, the elect are the vast majority, while the accursed are that tiny minority that ruins things for everyone else. Their alternate universe is one in which evil is focused and limited, a mere stain on their beautiful universe. They deny that "le mal est sur la terre"; they deny that "your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour."

(Traveller: Greetings--that last phrase (I Peter 5:8) is a concise refutation of libertarianism.)

I commend to all interested persons the Neopopulism of Messrs. Kaardal and Dahlberg at neopopulism.org. They look at Rationalism as the insupportable, erroneous alternate non-reality, which is not inconsistent with Voegelin's analysis of Gnostic modernity. Rule by Rationalism implies rule by experts, which is the great contemporary assault on self-rule by a religious people.

Thanks my friend.
I read "The Fountainhead" when I was very young and very sick.
It gave me a boost that I could pull myself out of any problem, even sickness. I did. I was thinking about life as a normal, more or less, human being should, but I wasn't interested in scholarly preoccupations.
When I travelled, a lot, I came to realize that every normal human being has basically the same desires, needs, joys and thought patterns. The difference was the culture and the culture changed with the climate, in very rough lines.
This made me think. A random happening of life by a cosmic accident would never have this strict programming the human beings have. So although I am a born Catholic, I had not really put my foot in a church for decades and my attitudes towards priests were only on a personal level, if he was a good, intelligent being I respected him, and after meeting those 2 rare pearls:))) I didn't bother with the rest anymore.
Until I met in the same year in India, a Sufi(Muslim sect) and a Maharaj(herbal doctor and Guru). They were both the same people with the same values. I was shocked, the Sufi was about 40 years old and the Maharaj was 84 years old. I was their friend for 3 years, the time I lived in India. They made me think about the reason we are here and the origin of it all. We were just friends and they attached themselves to me in a natural comfortable way. They never asked anything and the Maharaj cured me of a nasty rheumatism but refused any payment. When you meet those "saints" who never made contact with Christianity but are living like Christ, you realize that all the philosophy in the world cannot even touch the silent teachings of a good man by his example and I met two of them. I was blessed.
That's why I love Dr. Bertonneau who can put in words what I felt in those days.
I hope I didn't ramble on too much.

Thank you for your reply. I think when Jesus says that he is the only Way, he may not be excluding the way to salvation through saintly men who do not profess him exclusively, or by name. In other words, he may have meant he was the only way in a formal sense; that only his form of experience and embodiment of the divine and of an "orientation to the divine" (the Father) can save us.

Voegelin says something quite interesting about Gnostic discourse in Part V of Order and History, called In Search of Order. The movement in history is a movement of “differentiations,” in which people enrich their understanding of the structure of reality. For example, the idea of cosmic order implicit in Egyptian polytheism is not false because there is a relation between order in the state and order in nature. The Hebrew discovery that there is an Author of Order external to the cosmos, to whom the individual has a relation, adds to the older idea of cosmic order a new dimension and in some sense supersedes it; but it does not cancel it. Similarly, Heraclitus’ intuition that there is a singular formative “Logos” beyond the celestial order of the Olympian Gods supersedes Homer’s image of Olympus but does not cancel it. Heraclitus says in one of his aphorisms that the “Logos” does and does not want to be called by the name of Zeus. This is a way of conceding that the old symbolism remains valid but must also make room for the new symbolism. The new absorbs the old. Voegelin also notes, in the same fifth volume of Order and History, that dissatisfaction with existing symbolism, as an image of reality, is common both to the healthy and the unhealthy dissatisfaction. The Gnostics, in this sense, are responding to the same disappointment in the old symbols as the philosophers and the Christian Fathers. One must grant to the ancient Gnostics a valid sense that a new image of reality was required because of the growing inadequacy of the old image. (Just not theirs.)

One could consider Ayn Rand in a similar light. Rand is an excellent observer of the collectivist mentality, of a certain type of hypocritical conformism, and of epistemological relativism. The politicians currently in ascendance in Western nations strongly resemble the weasels and gangsters who hijack government in Atlas Shrugs, or who run New York City in The Fountainhead. Those novels therefore have something to tell us about our current plight. Unfortunately, Rand also resembles the people whom she denounces, for she was as much a demagogue, as much of subjectivist, as much of a self-deluder, as they. She extolled what she called reality but she did not live in it; she lived in a cultic-utopian bubble, like the one she describes in Atlas Shrugged, in the shape of Galt’s Rocky-Mountain hideaway.

I wish to express my gratitude to everyone who has made an attempt at these articles, which are burdened (I am afraid) by the infelicities of my English-teacher prose. When Capodistrias remarks that a sentence “in Part IV” of the current essay provokes him to think of Rand, it is heartening to the author, who knows that at least one reader (or two – I must not leave out Traveller) has made his way to the end!

Gnosticism remains radically different from both the emerging Christianity of Late Antiquity and the lingering paganism in respect to its adjustment to existence. For Gnostics, the material world is toxic and God is radically alien to it. ...For Christians, inheriting the Jewish view, God is also the benevolent Creator of a world that is good, over which he places humanity in stewardship.

This is a succinct general formulation, however I'm sure we've all met certain modern day Christians who hold a view that creation is, in fact, inherently evil, and anything associated with desire towards creation (for example, what they would term carnal lust) is to be avoided at all costs. For them, even within approved marriage relationships, it is difficult to overcome intense guilt--a guilt arising from a religious view that temptation is the act of an external being influencing them; a being responsible for the evil nature of the world as it exists today, but not as it was when created (documented by the Genesis story). This being is, of course, Satan, or the devil. For them, the ontological status of evil does not manifest in the traditional (at least from the time of St. Augustine) Catholic philosophical view of evil as privation, a moving down in the level of authentic being which flows from God, who is viewed as identical with the Good.

As far as Rand goes, one cannot (and I don't think anyone here does) discount her "utility" in appealing to mostly impressionable youngsters. If it were not for her writings, many would never be exposed to anything but the mainstream leftist views, especially on college campuses.

Even if they spend a few years "in the cult" it's not too much of a problem as long as they learn from their experiences, and grow. The problem for them, of course, would be not to progress, and not to find out for themselves whether her views on philosophers (whom she likely never read, of if she did it was only superficially) were correct. As her followers move through the chain of a mostly Jewish intellectual strain of anarcho-capitalism (Menger, Mises, and Rothbard--to include Rand, herself) perhaps they can begin to better understand, and formulate to their satisfaction, whether this sort of behavioral economic reductionism is ultimately satisfying as a way to explain what it means to be truly human.

Finally, why Dr. Bertonneau would ever apologize for such clear and precise writing is a mystery I'll never hope to understand.

I was introduced to Rand some 30 years ago by a Rand like character. I liked the Fountainhead and then read everything I could find by and about her, saving Atlas for last. Like the Monty Python 'Diner' sketch, Atlas proved to be one little mint too much. Hamburger, eggs whatever it was, I still crack up everytime I hear Atlas Shrugged.

One of best short and concise treatment of the fundamental problem with Rand's thinking is in Architects of the Culture of Death by Donald De Marco and Benjamin Wiker (Ignatius Press, 2004)

Capodistrias writes: “I don’t know how anyone got past the page [in Atlas Shrugged] when they arrive at the diner and tasted the most delicious hamburger ever made!”

As for getting past the first chapters – a few years ago George Panichas commissioned me to write an essay on Atlas Shrugged, which appeared in Modern Age in 2004 or thereabouts (“From Romantic Fallacy to Holocaustic Imagination”). So I more or less obliged myself to read the thing. The most agonizing passages are the sex-scenes, which could only have been written by someone who had almost no knowledge of sex and who understood neither the physiology nor the emotionality of love making.

As to “the most delicious hamburger ever made”: When Dagny Taggart first finds herself in “Atlantis,” John Galt’s camouflaged techno-utopia in the Rocky Mountains, her first deed is to cook the best scrambled eggs ever made – I think it’s in honor of Galt, who is her host, but maybe it’s for Reardon. (It little matters.) Given the anti-procreative, no-children-please ethos of Rand’s novel, scrambling eggs takes on an over-determined metaphorical weightiness, doesn’t it?

It's extremely interesting how the gnostics of any kind try to elevate the human being, mostly selectively chosen, to an almost Godlike level, thus revealing their desire for a God-Being.
Ayn Rand is a case in point, although I love "The Fountainhead"

I don't know how anyone got past the page when they arrive at the diner and tasted the most delicious hamburger ever made! One of the most comical moments in modern literature, as unintentional as it may have been. Thanks for the Rothbard link...Hilarious.

One could easily point out other “Gnostic” traits of Rand’s story in Atlas Shrugged. The relation of the protagonists to John Galt is the relation of the Aeons to the Father; everything else, including all other people, belongs to the demonic realm. While the demonic realm self-destructs, Galt and a few others are building the “second reality” in the Rocky Mountains: In Gnostic terms they are reconstituting the Pleroma, based on Galt’s magical “free energy motor.” Atlas Shrugged is remarkably anti-procreative. None of the protagonists has children. When Dagny Taggart and Reardon are searching through the vast Northeastern rustbelt for clues about Galt, they encounter, in a rundown village, a shoeless, illiterate girl, whose obvious pregnancy the prose clearly treats as a sign of her ignorance, helplessness, and doom. This brings up the question of how viable the Rocky Mountain retreat will be in the long term. There is no real point in asking the question, however, since it would apply only to a human community. Rand’s characters are indeed gods. In real life (if that were the term), Rand acted like a Manichaean cult-leader and was “served,” so to speak, by her young acolytes. A few saw through the clouds of incense and rejected the display. Thus Murray Rothbard stands to Rand as Saint Augustine stood to Faustus the Manichaean. (See Rothbard’s “Mozart was a Red,” a one-act play.) Of course, like the Gnostic documents themselves Atlas Shrugged makes for interesting reading. It is a science fiction novel combining traits of the Philip Wylie brand of end-of-the-world narrative with those of the John W. Campbell super-machinery story. A good deal of science fiction resembles a Gnostic fantasy – for example, the various superman stories by A. E. van Vogt, such as Slan (1946) and The World of Null A (1948).

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